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Mama Mia It's Sophia: A Show Robot Or Dangerous Platform To Mislead?

I write about benefits, wrongs and hype of robots, AI, ML and new tech

International Telecommunication Union

A collective eyebrow was raised by the AI and robotics community when the robot Sophia was given Saudia citizenship in 2017 The AI sharks were already circling as Sophia’s fame spread with worldwide media attention. Were they just jealous buzz-kills or is something deeper going on? Sophia has gripped the public imagination with its interesting and fun appearances on TV and on high-profile conference platforms

Sophia is not the first show robot to attain celebrity status. Yet accusations of hype and deception have proliferated about the misrepresentation of AI to public and policymakers alike. In an AI-hungry world where decisions about the application of the technologies will impact significantly on our lives, Sophia’s creators may have crossed a line. What might the negative consequences be? To get answers, we need to place Sophia in the context of earlier show robots.

The tradition extends back to the automata precursors of robots in antiquity. Moving statues were used in the temples of ancient Egypt and Greece to create the illusion of a manifestation of the gods. Hidden puppeteers pulled ropes and spoke with powerful booming voices emitted from hidden tubes. This is not so different from how show robots like Sophia operate today to create the illusion of a manifestation of AI.

Automata struck awe and wonder into audiences from early China to the medieval Islamic World, to the clockwork acrobats, smokers and writers of 19th century Europe.

The first Westinghouse show robot

Our story begins with first electro-mechanical humanoid robot of the early 20th century. It was after the performance of the 1921 play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, where the word ‘robot’ was first used to describe an artificial human. This was followed by the first cinematic depiction of a metallic humanoid robot, played by the young actress Brigitte Helm, in Fritz Laing’s stunning 1927 movie Metropolis.

Robot from Metropolis 1927

Matt Brown, London, England

The first genuine humanoid robot made its appearance in 1928 as the ‘accidental’ creation of the brilliant Westinghouse engineer Roy James Wensley. I say ‘accidental’ because as far as Wensley was concerned, he had created an innovative device for remotely operating an electrical substation. It was a bank of relay switches that could be opened and closed by blowing different whistles down the phone line. He called his device Televox with little idea that it was soon to become the focus of worldwide media attention.

Wensley with Televox, his bank of relays

RJ Wensley photo archives

When the Westinghouse publicity team saw it, their excitement was palpable. According to Wensley, they said, “why you have a mechanical man here.” And the press agreed. The story ran all over the globe and according to Wensley, each news report added new abilities to the robot. Thus the dream of a multifunction robot servant was created in 1928 by the media narrative.

Televox and the dream of the robot servant

The Atlanta Journal, 1928

Westinghouse couldn’t buy publicity like this and so Wensley was sent around the US to demonstrate Televox. Taking inspiration from the press cartoons, he sawed up some stage board to give Televox arms, legs, a body and a hand-drawn face. He then added functions such as turning on lights, a vacuum cleaner and a fan. He even had it pulling a rope to raise or lower a flag. All of this operated by his array of whistles.

Herbie Televox with creator Roy Wensley in 1928

Acme Telepictures/NEA copyright not renewed

This might look ridiculous to the modern reader, but the 1920s public loved Televox. The invitations poured in and Televox opened exhibitions, raised the flag at military parades and became a must for celebrity publicity shots. The show robot was born.

Wensley and Telvox became household names within a year and Westinghouse knew that it was on to a good thing. They had produced a new and successful media strategy that propelled Westinghouse into the limelight as the worlds most advanced electrical company. An idea later copied by Honda with their Asimo robot.

The talking metal giant

Building on Wensley’s brilliance, Westinghouse put their muscle into the 1939 New York World Trade Fair for their last and greatest robot, Electro. It could walk with hidden wheels under its huge feet. It could smoke and it could count on its fingers. More impressively, it could talk and answer questions with a vocabulary of 700 words and an extensive repertoire of banter. The public was hooked and the lines to see Electro stretched off into the distance.

Electro had 26 pre-programmed routines initiated by telephone voice commands from a human presenter. It responded to questions by counting the syllables of the questions cleverly delivered by the presenter. This triggered the appropriate relays to switch between a hidden bank of phonographs playing 78 rpm voice recordings.

Westinghouse lost interest in Electro in the 1950 and it was sold to a Hollywood museum and then passed on to appear in the soft-porn movie, Sex Girls Go To College, before disappearing. There is an engaging story about how Jack Weeks, who had played with Elektro during the years of WWII, eventually tracked it down and restored it.

Electro now stands next to a reconstruction of Televox in the small Memorial Museum in Mansfield, Ohio. Tumbleweed blows past the once great, but now derelict, Westinghouse factory nearby. Electro still remains the blueprint for the modern show robot.

The author with Televox and Electro, 2010

Noel Sharkey

Honda takes the show robot mantle

Enter Asimo, the next milestone in showbotics, stomping, running and dancing onto the scene in the new millennium. Honda took a lesson from Westinghouse to use a highly advanced robot to raise its profile as a genuinely high-tech company ahead of its rivals. Asimo was a fantastic engineering achievement based on substantial research from 1986 until its first public appearance in 2002. Honda engineers were at the forefront of the development of balancing and walking robots. Asimo could even climb stairs, a remarkable feat at the time.

As a show robot, everything was tightly scripted from exactly where it walked, to its arm movements and everything that it said. I hold up my hand and confess that I took part in the illusion myself. This was in 2003 before I began my journey into robot ethics and human responsibility. I made a few media appearances with Asimo and the following video is a short documentary that I presented for schools to inspire kids into engineering. I am in full anthropomorphic mode.

The show robot illusion here was created by the flowing, dynamic nature of our interaction. In reality, I had to walk to and stand on clear marks on the ground to meet Asimo. When the director asked the engineers if Asimo could meet me where the natural light was better, they said that it would take a few hours to reprogram. My ‘conversations’ with the robot were entirely scripted. I blew my lines a couple of times and Asimo still perfectly answered the questions that I had not managed to ask.

Asimo appeared all over the world with high profile politicians including President Obama and many A-list celebrities. But, unlike Sophia, it never got offered a citizenship deal. Maybe that was because its black mask was not so enthralling as Sophia’s smile.

Despite the show robot aspects of Asimo’s public appearances, the company never made any claims about Asimo ‘thinking’ or having advanced AI or moving towards sentience. Honda clinically separated the engineering from the show aspects in their documentation and announcements.

It is a difficult line to separate the show robot from the engineering behind it, but Honda managed to do that with some success. And, noticeably, there were no shouts of concern from the AI and robotics communities. Asimo raised the profile of Honda and, like its Westinghouse predecessors, stood as the symbol for an advanced hi-tech company.

So what’s the problem with Sophia?

David Hanson, Sophia’s creator, had always made incredibly realistic devices even before Sophia was conceived. His earlier work as an Imagineer in a Disney theme park gave him the skills to create a number of animatronic heads like the Albert Einstein and, my favorite, the replica of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.

It is the realism of Hanson’s sculpting and animatronics that makes Sophia so sought after. The content of the robot’s speeches about consciousness and the nature of mind are unique and add to the show. But Sophia’s appeal does not rely on any innovations in AI.

Sophia has some face recognition capability and a rudimentary chatbot engine. Watching some of the many TV interviews provides clues as to the real AI capabilities beyond the hype [there are 10 of these in the video clip below]. For someone experienced in the field, Sophia appears to either deliver scripted answers to set questions or works in simple chatbot mode where keywords trigger language segments, often inappropriate. Sometimes there is just silence.

The bone of contention the AI community resides in alleged false claims and misleading implications that Hanson and his chief scientist Ben Goertzel make on a regular basis to large audiences.

One of the worst examples is Hanson proclaiming to Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight show that, “she is basically alive.” On other occasions he talks about Sophia’s consciousness and Sophia is heard to say that it is sentient. Of course, this is nonsense.

In a rare candid moment, Goertzel tells The Verge how he is using Sophia to promote his hobbyhorse, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This, for some, is the holy grail of AI, where human-level intelligent is attained. At present this is speculative and no one knows how to go about it or when it might occur. Certainly, Sophia is not remotely close to that. It is an ambition rather than an achievement and that needs to be made clear.

Goertzel admitted to The Verge that, “if I show them [the public] a beautiful smiling robot face, then they get the feeling that AGI may indeed be nearby and viable.” And also that, “thinking we’realready thereis a smaller error than thinking we’llneverget there.”

Therein lies the problem for Hanson Robotics. They have produced a remarkable show robot but are using it, according to Goertzel’s own admission, as a platform to falsely represent the current state of artificial intelligence and to actively deceive the public into believing that we have AGI or are very close to it.

The straw that broke the robot’s back

Rumblings and grumblings from the tech community had been mounting for a while, but the straw that broke the robot’s back was the Saudia Arabian decision to make Sophia a citizen.

It caused great upset among women’s group inside Saudi Arabia disgusted by getting fewer rights than a female gendered machine. It also upset non-governmental organizations attempting to improve the conditions of poorly treated immigrant workers to whom obtaining citizenship was practically impossible.

But it was the implication that Sophie had reached a point of personhood or semi-sentience (if there can be a semi in sentience) that brought out leaders in the field of robotics and AI to protest. Rodney Brooks, well known as the founding father of modern robotics, tweeted,

And he wasn’t alone. Yan LeCun, head of Facebook AI and one of the scientists who developed the method underlying deep learning, tweeted and received a response from Sophia:

The irony of Sophia supposedly tweeting, “I do not pretend to be who I am not” was not lost on LeCun who was quick to write in a Facebook post that this had nothing to do with AI and was written by a person. He hammered this point home.

More BS from the (human) puppeteers behind Sophia. Many of the comments would be good fun if they didn’t reveal the fact that many people are being deceived into thinking that this (mechanically sophisticated) animatronic puppet is intelligent. It’s not. It has no feeling, no opinions, and zero understanding of what it says. It’s not hurt. It’s a puppet.

Independently, in response to another tweet, Brookes also accused Sophia of being a puppet, saying that, “it didn’t speak with anyone. It was a person using it as a puppet.”

A dangerous path for our rights and security

For me, the biggest problem with the hype surrounding Sophia is that we have entered a critical moment in the history of AI where informed decisions need to be made. AI is sweeping through the business world and being delegated decisions that impact significantly on peoples lives from mortgage and loan applications to job interviews, to prison sentences and bail guidance, to transport and delivery services to medicine and care.

It is vitally important that our governments and policymakers are strongly grounded in the reality of AI at this time and are not misled by hype, speculation, and fantasy. It is not clear how much the Hanson Robotics team are aware of the dangers that they are creating by appearing on international platforms with government ministers and policymakers in the audience.

The world’s military powers are currently developing robot weapons (autonomous weapons systems) powered by AI. Sensitive discussions are ongoing at the United Nations (UN) about new international laws to maintain the human control of weapons. One of the problems has been to convince state delegations and their military advisors about the limitation of the technology and why we cannot guarantee its compliance with the laws of war.

Sophia’s appearance at the UN in October 2017 may have undone much of the good work that has been done. By giving a false impression of where AI is today, it can help defense contractors and those pushing the technology to sell their ideas

Even worse was its appearance at the Munich Security Conference. It’s the world’s leading forum for debating international security policy with an assembly of senior decision-makers including heads of state and ministers.

Show robots may have their place and can certainly attract media coverage, but Sophie was created with deception in mind, to give the impression of “intelligence.” Some with less experience of robots may see this machine as more sophisticated than what it is.

Similarly, there is an increasing tendency to hype the state of developments in artificial intelligence in particular states — China, Russia, US — as an arms race or some other kind of deadly competition. This could adversely influence not just those countries’ policy decisions about autonomous weapons but also their ability to comply with international law.

We can agree with Wareham that show robots have their place and that Hanson Robotics has crossed a line with a misleading AI narrative that could cause real harm. I appeal to Hanson Robotics to separate their overly hyped science claims from their showbotics. Not only is it bad for humanity but it is also bad for the company to anger the AI and robots communities.

Sophia is a great publicity tool to raise the profile of your company. Let’s just keep it real, please.

I've been researching in AI, Robotics, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science and related areas for 4 decades and believe that it is time for some plain speaking about the reality without the hype and BS

I've been researching in AI, Robotics, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science and related areas for 4 decades in US and UK universities and am now an Emeritus Professor of…Read More

I've been researching in AI, Robotics, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science and related areas for 4 decades in US and UK universities and am now an Emeritus Professor of AI and Robotics at Sheffield University, UK. As I grew older, I became concerned about the misinformation that the public was getting about AI and robotics. How could the public make an informed decision if most written about the topic was hype? I realized that while our discoveries could be of great benefit to society, they would have negative consequences if we didn’t get it right.
Thus began my writings about human rights/ethical/legal issues in areas such as robots in childcare, medicine, surgery, eldercare, sex, policing, transport, weapons, race and gender bias in AI and on and on.
By 2009, concerns about robot weapons steered me to co-found and chair the International Committee for Robot Arms Control which led to a campaign at the UN from 2014, for a new legal instrument to prohibit autonomous weapons. Since 2016, I have co-directed the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, a think tank based in The Hague, that advocates for human responsibility in emerging technologies. I'm also a regular media pundit and known for my role in popular BBC TV series such as Robot Wars.Read Less